The Alumni Friends of UQ Collection Study Room

Getting up close and personal with the UQ Art Collection

“When you have the chance to examine an artwork directly, you can discover so much more about how it’s made, details that are not easily reproduced, and most importantly, gain a sense of what the artist is trying to convey. The Collection Study Room will not only help develop visual analysis skills, but will also help educate users on how to properly handle and look after artworks.” — Alice-Anne Psaltis, Bachelor of Arts, Honours in Art History

Education is at the heart of all of UQ Art Museum’s programs and making visual art part of student learning is an important and ongoing goal. To go some way towards achieving this goal, we recognised that students needed a space where they could access and study artwork.

So it is with great pleasure that we announce the Alumni Friends of UQ Collection Study Room will open in April 2015.

Fully funded by a generous community of donors, the new purpose-built, dedicated workroom on the top floor of the Art Museum will provide a way for students from any discipline, as well as researchers, secondary students and interested members of the public, to request supervised access to examine artworks from the UQ Art Collection.

With a history of some seven decades of collection development, the UQ Art Collection is one of Queensland’s largest public art collections and includes over 3,700 artworks. It comprises works by major Australian artists from the colonial period to the present, as well as a significant collection of Chinese antiquities. In 2004, the University initiated the National Collection of Artists’ Self Portraits, an important focus area within the Collection.

Whether you’re interested in alienation or visual perception, postcolonialism or the environment, history or technology, artists’ self portraits or portrayals or flora, fauna and the cities we live in, the UQ Art Collection lends itself to broad-ranging fields of study.

Forever grateful to our UQ Art Museum supporters

This project would not have been possible without our generous donors whose names will feature on the walls of our new facility. Sixty-six kind donors, including current students, alumni, staff, businesses, friends and organisations such as the student-led UQ Society of Fine Arts (SoFA), gave gifts ranging from $25 to $250 to $50,000, with the youngest donor aged 26. Every bit counted and combined to make this plan an exciting reality.

UQ Art Museum is proud to recognise the generosity of the major donor to this project, the Alumni Friends of The University of Queensland Inc, by naming this wonderful new facility in their honour: Alumni Friends of UQ Collection Study Room.